Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize that not every jump in the swimming pool needs to be photographed.
From the very beginning, I believed the parenting books that told me to take seriously my calling to motherhood. I wanted to love lavishly and give myself away conspicuously, not counting the sacrifices as pennies I expected to be repaid. Instead, I trusted that God saw the account balance, and he wanted it to be disproportionally weighted toward the five souls who depended upon me. He wanted me heavy in the red and he wanted their accounts to have lots and lots of zeros and commas.
Living this way requires you to pour out and pour out—and you get tired. You have to trust God to supply what you need when you live in the red. You have to believe by faith that His promises are true and that He blesses obedience. Because there is just so much dying to self—so much red.
After living this way for eighteen years, I should have been prepared for the pain of letting a child go. But this season begets a whole different type of dying to self. The grief, sorrow, and self-pity overwhelm on the bad days, and sound like white noise in the background on the good days.
When I hear my son play the piano, I think to myself: this will not happen next year. When I watch him stand for saxophone solos, I think this will not happen next year. When I talk to him about the books we are reading while he eats trail mix in the kitchen, I think this will not happen next year. So much sorrow. And I feel so much loss.
But when I examine the nature of my loss and the depth of my sorrow, I find myself humbled. It has never been so clear to me how much all of my labors to grow a person, to nurture a soul and to build a family have born fruit. And it was all just mustard seeds scattered for years and years. It was just boxes and boxes of macaroni and cheese and swim lessons at the YMCA. It was books read over and over and piano lessons paid for. All of those mustard seeds have produced one hundred fold something so full of glory it takes my breath away.
There’s a lie out there that I’ve labored most of my adult life to keep from upsetting the account balances. It says that the work of motherhood is something you can opt-out of. This degrading and demeaning work cannot be expected of the modern woman. Someone else can make deposits in the accounts of your children while you go and get the deposits you need elsewhere.
Nothing worth doing comes without cost. There simply must be a cost paid to create a home and a family. Someone must decide the cost will be paid by her own blood, sweat, and tears. She must decide that God’s economy matters most and she is going all in, confident a big pay day is coming.
I cry a lot these days. Some of the tears are joyful. Some not at all. But my constant encouragement comes when I remember that God has in fact blessed my obedience beyond what I could have imagined and definitely don’t deserve. That obedience, which actually came at a great personal cost, has produced the sort of people I want in my life forever, who I admire deeply, and want as lifelong friends.
Mandi Gerth serves alongside a dedicated team of classical educators at Coram Deo Academy in Dallas, Texas, where she currently teaches fourth grade. She and her husband have labored for over twenty years to build a family culture for their five children that values books, baseball, museums, home-cooked meals, and conversation about ideas.